{"id":217725,"date":"2025-10-16T12:38:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T12:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/217725\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T12:38:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T12:38:10","slug":"xi-directs-quashing-of-chinese-feminists-even-as-he-praises-advances-at-womens-conference-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/217725\/","title":{"rendered":"Xi directs quashing of Chinese feminists even as he praises advances at women\u2019s conference | China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Addressing dignitaries gathered in Beijing on Monday, Xi Jinping<\/a> praised the \u201chistoric achievements\u201d of women\u2019s rights in China. In the past 30 years, the Chinese president said, maternal mortality rates had dropped by nearly 80%, and women were now participating in the project of national governance with \u201cunprecedented confidence and vigour\u201d.<\/p>\n

Xi was speaking at the global women\u2019s summit, an event on Monday and Tuesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the historic UN\u2019s world conference on women<\/a>, which took place in Beijing. It was there in 1995 that Hillary Clinton, the then US first lady, delivered her \u201cwomen\u2019s rights are human rights\u201d speech, lines now often quoted by people in China advocating for women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

This year, Chinese officials used Xi\u2019s speech to highlight the contributions that China has made to women\u2019s advancements. Xi announced a $10m (\u00a37.5m) donation to UN Women<\/a>, the organisation\u2019s gender-equality agency, as well as a $100m fund for global south countries.<\/p>\n

But while Xi hailed a \u201cglorious chapter of women\u2019s progress\u201d, in recent years, Chinese feminists have found it increasingly difficult to advocate for, or even speak about, women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, countless people, primarily young women, identify as feminists and practice feminist choices in their personal lives,\u201d said L\u00fc Pin, an activist based in New Jersey who founded an influential feminist organisation in China<\/a> that was forced to close in 2018.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, feminist activities beyond personal life are severely limited, including public discussion, let alone policy advocacy, accountability and collective action,\u201d said L\u00fc, who has been based in the US since 2015, when several of her associates, known as the \u201cfeminist five\u201d, were detained in China after a protest they staged about sexual harassment on public transport.<\/p>\n

As leader, Xi has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society and led a patriarchal turn in politics. In 2022 he unveiled a new politburo, the executive body of the Chinese Communist party, which for the first time since 1997 included no women<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although social attitudes towards divorce and workplace equality have become more liberal, the government routinely exhorts women to fulfil what it says are traditional responsibilities of marriage and child-bearing, especially to help the country tackle its falling birthrate<\/a>. In 2023, Xi said that China should \u201ccultivate a new marriage and child-bearing culture\u201d.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s president,Xi Jinping (centre left), and his wife, Peng Liyuan (centre right) with national leaders and delegates at the global women\u2019s summit. Photograph: Ken Ishii\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

While organised feminist groups have mostly been squashed, there are still independent bloggers and commentators who focus on women\u2019s issues. However, even these are under increasing pressure.<\/p>\n

Last month, the official WeChat account of feminist blogger Jiang Chan, whose articles regularly garnered more than 100,000 views, according to China Digital Times<\/a>, was deleted.<\/p>\n

It came a few weeks after more than 1,300 accounts on Weibo, a separate social media platform with nearly 600 million monthly active users, were given temporary or permanent bans for inciting \u201cgender antagonism\u201d. One account was temporarily banned for posting \u201cextreme anti-marriage\u201d rhetoric.<\/p>\n

In June, the platform launched a dedicated complaints category<\/a> for reporting content that \u201cpromotes gender antagonism\u201d.<\/p>\n

Wang Huiling, a vlogger from rural Anhui province, shot to fame during the Covid-19 pandemic with her forthright videos about marriage, family and women\u2019s independence. Her experience of coming from a village, where social norms are more conservative, stood in contrast to the more middle-class feminist discourse from China\u2019s cities. \u201cWhen I started posting videos online in 2019, I hadn\u2019t heard of feminism,\u201d she said. She just wanted to share the real-life struggles that she and the women around her faced in Chinese society. \u201cIt was only later that I realised I was part of the feminist community and that women fighting for their human rights were feminists.\u201d<\/p>\n

At her peak, she had more than 4 million followers on Douyin, TikTok\u2019s sister app in China, and, according to Wang, more than 6 million fans across different platforms.<\/p>\n

But Wang\u2019s precise reach in China is now hard to gauge because, in January, all of her social media accounts were deleted without explanation. In April, she was informed that her 2021 memoir, Grassroots Women, had been banned from being reprinted (although it is still available for sale on e-commerce platforms). \u201cI don\u2019t know the specific reason for the ban, but it was probably because they were afraid of my awakening of independence in some women,\u201d Wang said.<\/p>\n

Additional research by Lillian Yang<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Addressing dignitaries gathered in Beijing on Monday, Xi Jinping praised the \u201chistoric achievements\u201d of women\u2019s rights in China.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-217725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}